The Book of Life

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A brilliant debut about faith, family, grief, love, temptation and redemption from a striking and original American voice.

Synopsis

The Book of Life by Stuart Nadler

In The Book of Life, as in life, moments of unsettling tension and grief sit alongside those of humour and happiness. There are huge betrayals one man sleeps with his best friend's daughter, one with his best friend's wife. There are uncompromisingly awkward situations between estranged brothers called upon to clear out the house of their recently deceased parents; between three generations of men who, despite the obvious family ties, have never stood together in the same room. There are tales of broken bonds and the struggle for redemption one man, unwillingly thrust into an open marriage, tries to readjust to his new life; two former lovers are desperate to rekindle the only relationship that ever mattered, but remain reluctant to admit their past offences. These compulsively readable stories mark Stuart Nadler as a fresh and perceptive new voice, a writer in the great American tradition, but one who emerges from the shadows of Updike, of Bellow, of Cheever and stakes his own bold and exciting claim.

Reviews

'In The Book of Life , Stuart Nadler offers a fresh, funny, perceptive take on the current state of the Jewish family, including the families we make with our friends and lovers. Like Bernard Malamud, Nadler has a gift for comic/ironic dialogue and for setting thoroughly modern characters on a collision course with the distant past. A truly talented writer.' -- Sharon Pomerantz, author of Rich Boy

About the Author

Stuart Nadler is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Recently, he was the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic.